Program Information

In-House Credentialing

J Hevezi1*, (1) ,Fair Oaks Ranch, TX

TU-E-137-1 Tuesday 2:00PM - 2:55PM Room: 137

The issue of in-house credentialing has taken on added importance with more complex procedures and the recent emphasis on safety, especially in imaging and radiation oncology procedures. Medical Physicists have been categorized as Allied Health Professionals on most hospital and facility rosters with little more than proof of board certification as their chief credentialing statistic. Now, medical staff credentialing bodies have required more specific training in specialty procedures such as IMRT, SRS, SBRT, IGRT and specialized brachytherapy procedure like HDR, eye plaques, prostate seed implants, etc. Vendor training both on and off site for complex planning and treatment delivery systems like VMAT, RapidArc, TrueBeam, Tomotherapy and GammaKnife/ CyberKnife, to list but a few of the new technologies, are paramount in understanding the accurate and safe use of these systems. Societies offer guidelines and standards that may be useful in their applications and should be considered required reading. Departmental guidelines may require proctoring on a minimum number of cases.

Although Board Certification bodies credential candidates over a broad range of specialty procedures, practitioners are more and more called on to have a greater detailed knowledge base of these complex systems and procedures. Many Medical Physicists have limited themselves to becoming proficient at one or two of these more specialized technologies. Indeed, the radiological community has answered this call by instituting additional certifications, the CAQ (Certificate of Added Qualification). These are achieved through spending an additional year of fellowship training to attain this detailed training. And, perhaps, Medical Physicists need to look to this additional fellowship training to achieve similar proficiency in one or more of these fields. Perhaps CAMPEP could take on sanctioning of these specialty fellowships. However it is structured, each department will have the onus of deciding on a program to credential Medical Physicists in these new specialty categories.

Learning Objectives:1.Understand the structure of hospital and facility credentialing procedures2.Make use of guidelines and standards to apply new technologies properly3.Understand the departmental evaluation of skill sets for complex procedures, proctoring number of case, etc.4.Finally, explore the possibility of a medical physics fellowship to gain more skills and experience in focused specialties